2025-08-08
A state-space approach to modelling multinomially distributed community data.
The cutting edge in palaeoecology is to establish potential relationships between patterns observed in species relative abundances and environmental covariates. For example, are observed patterns driven by:
This is what we want to know if we are to use palaeoecology to inform management of contemporary ecosystems or inform potential future ecosystem states. No easy task!
State-space modelling goes beyond descriptive approaches and attempts to estimate:
Supported hypotheses: given the data, species interactions are important but climate covariates have a stronger influence.
Supported Hypotheses
Results are not causal but test multiple hypotheses
